Corrupted By Trump Allies, Paramount Is Mangling CBS-- And CNN May Be Next
The Tuesday announcement by Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN, that it is reopening deal talks with Paramount marks the latest example of President Donald Trump’s corrupt effort to quell dissent by pushing media companies into the hands of his supporters.
Warner Bros. agreed in December to sell its movie and streaming assets to Netflix and spin off its cable networks, including CNN, into a new entity. But Paramount, owned by David Ellison, the son of megabillionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison, is mounting a hostile bid to take over the entire company — and the Ellisons have a powerful ally in the White House.
Trump has spent the last decade waging war on the free press, which he regularly denounces for providing coverage he finds insufficiently sycophantic. He relies on state power to either cudgel media oligarchs into line or force them to sell to others who will, aping the authoritarian tactics of autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. This corrupt influence is particularly effective during media mergers — Netflix’s deal for Warner Bros. is facing a gauntlet of federal antitrust regulators, while a Paramount deal backed by Trump could sail through.
The Ellison takeover of Paramount subsidiary CBS demonstrates proof of concept for what CNN could look like under Paramount's auspices. Network employees have repeatedly warned in recent weeks that CBS is coming under the administration’s thumb. For those who appreciate the free press, these are worrisome signs that media independence is crumbling under Trump. To those within the administration, however, these warnings likely function as signals that the Ellisons are willing to carry out the president’s agenda — and that if Trump likes what the Ellisons are doing at CBS, he should help them buy Warner Bros. so they can do the same to CNN.
Stephen Colbert blows whistle on CBS bowing to Trumpist pressure
On Monday night, The Late Show host Stephen Colbert told his viewers that his interview with James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, had been spiked by the network.
“He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert explained.
The lawyers, Colbert said, were worried about Brendan Carr, the Trumpy Federal Communications Commission chairman famous for briefly driving Jimmy Kimmel off the air last year by threatening ABC and network affiliates with regulatory retaliation because he disapproved of one of Kimmel’s jokes. In January, Carr issued a letter in which he warned that an exemption commonly applied to network interviews with politicians would not apply to late-night shows if the interviews were deemed to be “motivated by partisan purposes,” and thus such shows would need to provide equal time to every candidate.
CBS could try to defend the news value of Colbert’s interviews and fight Carr in court — but instead the network did what Carr apparently wanted, obeying in advance and keeping a critic of the Trump administration off its airwaves.
“Let’s just call this what it is,” Colbert concluded. “Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV, OK?”
CBS News journalists are leaving the network due to its right-wing takeover
Such capitulations are becoming more common at CBS News, where David Ellison installed anti-”woke” pundit Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief last year, according to a farewell note from longtime producer Alicia Hastey, who accepted a buyout from the network last week.
“There has been a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism,” Hastey wrote. She warned that the network’s stories are now being “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations — a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”
Hastey did not give specific examples of this political skewing of the network’s journalism, and internal debates over stories are typically a black box to those of us watching from home. But the same week, Media Matters found that CBS Evening News — the network flagship news program helmed by Tony Dokoupil, a CBS veteran Weiss selected for the high-profile post — had effectively inverted a data analysis of immigration detentions published by the network’s website in order to hew closer to the Trump administration’s narratives.
The dynamics Hastey highlighted have other longtime CBS reporters looking for the exits. She was one of 11 Evening News production staff out of a total of roughly 40 to take buyouts. Turnover is also ongoing at 60 Minutes; news broke on Monday that Anderson Cooper is leaving his post as a correspondent for the program after two decades. Status’ Oliver Darcy reported that Cooper “had grown increasingly uneasy with the rightward direction the network has charted under Weiss’s leadership and David Ellison’s ownership of parent company Paramount,” and pointed to an “intense level of editorial scrutiny” given to a piece Cooper was reporting out on the Trump administration’s acceptance of white South African refugees.
Darcy also pointed to three other correspondents for the show who could also leave the network, including Sharyn Alfonsi, who had fought with Weiss over her delayed airing of a segment on the Trump administration’s rendition of immigrants to a Central American torture prison, as well as Scott Pelley and Lesley Stahl, who he noted “have been outspoken over the last year about the alarming state of affairs at CBS News.”
When reporters leave shows like 60 Minutes and CBS Evening News, they create openings for Weiss to fill, speeding up the timeline for her to mold the staff to her preferences. And her hiring preferences to date have included veterans of her right-wing Free Press outlet, as well as Mark Hyman, a physician and close ally of anti-vax House and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Peter Attia, a celebrity wellness influencer whose extensive communications with Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in a trove of files released by the Justice Department shortly after CBS announced his hiring.
CNN’s journalists can expect to be put through the same wringer if the Ellisons’ bid for Warner Bros. succeeds. For the Trump administration, that’s a reason to support it. In the current media environment, submission is a business model.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
